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crumbled, and to focus on the unprecedented results is arguably the historian's first task. Schorske performs it with a masterly combination of learning and interpretive strength, which he puts at the service of an intellectual passion that is evident on every page. His stance on the arts may sometimes narrow his results, but it never compromises their importance. Fin-de-Sikcle Vienna will be necessary reading for anyone interested in its subject.

JOHN

DEATHRIDGE

Anne Dzamba Sessa. Richard Wagner and the English. Rutherford,Madison, Teaneck: FairleighDickinson University Press. London: Associated University Presses, 1979. 191 pp. Penetrating Wagner'sRing:An Anthology. Edited by John Louis DiGaetani. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. London: Associated University Presses, 1978. 453 PP. The WagnerCompanion. Editedby Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton. London and Boston: Faberand Faber, 1979. 462 pp. Curt von Westernhagen. Wagner: A Biography. Translated by Mary Whittall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. 2 vols., xxiv, 654 pp. Anne Dzamba Sessa's monograph Richard Wagner and the English is an interesting and well-written account of Wagnerism in nineteenth-century England. It has all the familiar ingredients: incessant controversy, royal support, the sycophants, political dilettantism, simplistic philosophies, and Wagner's influence on literature and the visual arts. There are good passages on Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites, and some perceptive pages on Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Yet the book just misses its target. Sessa loves comparisons, but she avoids the ambiguities central to Wagner and Wagnerism. A remark like: "It is interesting to consider how many thousands of modern couples have been married to the strains of the Wedding March" (p. 152) should at least be peppered with the irony that, far from glorifying conjugal love in Lohengrin, Wagner presents it in a decidedly ambiguous light. Sessa should have told us,

too, that the Wedding March was used at the royal wedding of Princess Victoria of England and Prince Frederick William of Prussia in 1858, three years after Wagner's successful meeting with Queen Victoria, and one year after the London publisher J. F. Hope had brought out a complete English edition of the first full translation of a Lohengrin text-the Wagner opera to appear in any language. Sessa informs us that Wagner was drafted by some English authors "for the task of overthrowing Victorianism" (p. 87). But why did he attract both the rebels and the Establishment? And how did the moral quicksands of Lohengrin come to support the pious morality of Victorian society? Was it lack of perception? Or did the music tell a different story? Sessa's most original chapter is devoted to the radical Scotsman David Irvine. Besides writing several books on or relating to Wagner, Irvine became a watch-dog for sloppy scholarship and misguided proselytizing on Wagner's behalf. His philippic against the English translation of Wagner's autobiography Mein Leben, where he found single and multiple errors on 430 of its 886 pages, was, if anything, vastly understated; and his description of the empty moralizing in the young Ernest Newman's A Study of Wagner (1899) as fodder for a society of "Tartuffes, Scapins ... Beckmessers, and Mimes" is still refreshing. Sessa is surely right to accuse Irvine of using the best of Schopenhauer "to coat the most vile of Wagner's ideas" (p. 78). Irvine's plundering of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea to justify Wagner's racial ideology makes grotesque reading. Elsewhere Sessa tends to rely too much on secondary sources. Her conclusion that Wagner's notoriety after his first English concerts in 1855 was due to (among other things) his poor conducting sounds suspiciously like William Ashton Ellis, the ponderous translator of Wagner's prose works. Unwilling to admit the critical foibles of his countrymen, Ellis searched desperately for explanations of Wagner's raw treatment by the English critics. The original reviews, however, show that the critics objected less to Wagner's spirited conducting than to his unconventional readings of Beethoven and Mendelssohn which, because of short rehearsal time, often led to ragged en81

REVIEWS

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19TH CENTURY MUSIC

semble and misunderstandings between conductor and orchestra. In fact, it was a compliment to Wagner's talents as a conductor that the Old Philharmonic Orchestra grasped so much that was new so quickly. In addition, the cluded in the concerts hardly gave a true impression of the famous enfant terrible and his allegedly epoch-making innovations. The Wedding March as the "Music of the Future"? Beethoven conducted without a score and with constant changes of tempo? No wonder the critics were annoyed. Sessa writes interestingly about Ellis's editorship of the London Wagner Society's journal The Meister. Less convincing is her hypothesis that the journal's demise after only eight volumes was due to quarrelsprovoked by Ellis's exposure of Ferdinand Praeger's book bilingual title of the journal, Ellis's heavyhanded editing, and the dissolution of the London WagnerSociety in 1895 were probably the real culprits. Sessa also forgets to mention Houston Stewart Chamberlain's blistering review of Praeger's memoir in the Bayreuther Bldtter (1893), and his publication in the same journal (1894) of Wagner's letters to Praeger complete with a damning list of the latter's distortions. Chamberlain's attack was more thorough than Ellis's; it finally convinced the world that Praeger was a fraud and prompted Breitkopf to withdraw the German edition of the book. Incidentally, it is a pity that Sessa says so little about Chamberlain. This renegade Englishman not only helped forge the volkisch ideology of the Third Reich, he was also a significant influence on English Wagnerism, as his unpublished correspondence with Ashton Ellis shows. His first book (1892) was a clever, though tendentious, discussion of all Wagner's stage works. It was not specifically about Lohengrin, as Sessa incorrectly states.
The anthology Penetrating Wagner's Ring by John DiGaetani consists mainly of excerpts from books and essays printed elsewhere. Apart from old friends like Bernard Shaw and Jessie Weston, the intellectuals are less interesting than the practitioners. Solti's advice
82

excerpts from Tannhdiuser and Lohengrin in-

to young conductors on how to conduct Das Rheingold tells us more about the distribution of dramatic weight in the work than a host of high-minded analyses. And Sol Babitz's comments on some difficult, if well-nigh impossible, violin passages in the Ring are revealing about the realities behind Wagner's impressionistic effects. I only wish DiGaetani were a more penetrating editor. For example: unaware of the difference between Marxism and Shaw's peculiar brand of Romantic Socialism, Bryan rately as an interpretation of the Ring "as a Marxist allegory" (p. 76); Ernest Newman informs us that Wagner brings on the dragon in
Gdtterdammerung (p. 173); William Mann translates Die Gdtterddmmerung as "God's Magee describes The Perfect Wagnerite inaccu-

Wagner as I Knew Him (1892). The quaint

[sic] Go-down" (p. 193); George G. Windell writes Curt von Festerhagen instead of Westernhagen (p. 253); Wagnerdid not break off in the middle of Siegfried Act II before going on to Tristan as W. J. Henderson claims (p. 258)except for the orchestration, Wagnercomposed the second act to the end in 1857; Joseph Wechsberg mixes up Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, giving the children of the former to the latter and vice-versa (p. 431); and Frank B. Josserand on "Richard Wagner and German Nationalism" misconstrues Bismarck's letter thanking Wagner for a poem dedicated to the victorious German army in the FrancoPrussian War of 1870. Bismarck did not quite say that Wagner's music "had contributed to the German victory as much as had military successes" (p. 211). Referring to the Tannhduser scandal in Paris and the gradual acceptance of Wagner's works there, Bismarck wrote: "Yourworks ... have also overcome the resistance of the Parisians after a hard fight; and I hope and wish that many more victories will be granted to them at home and abroad."
The Wagner Companion and Curt von Westernhagen's biography Wagner are to be congratulated on the unlikely feat of turning Wagner into a paragon of virtue-a diplomatic tour de force supported by errors of fact' and a
'I have pointed out some of the more serious distortions in The Wagner Companion in the New Statesman ("Epic Errors," 16 November 1979).

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cavalier attitude toward important evidence. Although these books describe themselves respectively as "authoritative" and "up-to-date," neither mentions the invaluable source studies on Bayreuth by Michael Karbaum,Egon Voss, and Hartmut Zelinsky which the present writer brought to the attention of Englishplement (5 August 1977). Nor does the multilingual bibliographyof the Companion include the newest editions of the Collected Correspondence and the Collected Works. Even Westernhagen belittles these publications by mentioning the latter in only a single sentence and informing us that the first three volumes of publish, as far as possible in their original form, letters that have appeared in print before" (p. x). In fact, these volumes (up to 1851) include no fewer than fifty-five previously unpublished letters, another thirty published complete for the first time, Wagner's early diary (the socalled Rote Brieftasche), the original version of editorial detail invaluable to serious scholars.2 As for the Collected Works, if Westernhagen believes that 1841-48 is Wagner's "First Creative Period" (p. 57) or that Parsifal was conceived on Good Friday 1857 (p. 226), he should take a look at the first volume of orchestral works which shows that Wagner was busy composing as early as 1830, and the documentary volume for Parsifal which demolishes the Good Friday legend once and for all.3 The real trouble is that neither book seriously challenges the Wagnermyth. Even as circumspect a scholar as Robert Bailey, the sole contributor to the Companion who realizes the importance of documentary evidence, perpetuates one legend in his chapter on "The Method of Composition" when he writes: "It seems quite unthinkable that a great deal of the
2Siimtliche Briefe, ed. Gertrud Strobel and Werner Wolf (Leipzig, 1967-). Invaluable as it is, even this edition cannot claim to be complete. A list of more than a hundred letters either published incomplete or omitted altogether from the first three volumes is included in Egon Voss, "Wagners 'Saimtliche Briefe'?," MeloslNeue Zeitschrift fuir Musik 4 (1978), 291-23. 3Siimtliche Werke, gen. ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz, 1970-), XVIII [Orchesterwerke 1, ed. Egon Voss], XXX [Dokumentenband Parsifal, ed. Martin Geck and Egon Voss], 12-13.

speaking readers in the Times Literary Sup-

the Correspondence "for the most part ... re-

the Autobiographische

Skizze, and a wealth of

musical setting did not suggest itself to Wagner as he was constructing the verse" (p. 271). But it is unthinkable only if you accept Wagner's description of himself as a "word-tone poet" or the constant implication in his writings, and particularly the aesthetics of Die Meistersinger, that his texts and music were conceived in the same moment of inspiration. Westernhagen, too, succumbs entirely to Wagner's "word-tone poet" image when he writes that "the text and the music are only two different facets of the same thing" (Biography,p. 174);or "the verse itself must owe its form to the music that already existed within the composer" (p. 185). Why "must"? There is not one scrap of evidence proving that Wagner's musical ideas were anything but rudimentary when he was writing his librettos. Far from being a preordained unity, text and music were conceived in a more conventional sequence than most Wagnerians would like to suppose. This is not to cast aspersions on Wagner's art, of course. It simply means that those impressive phrases about "word-tone synthesis" and "drama emanating from the spirit of music" we all know from countless tomes on Wagner's aesthetics are to be taken definitely cum grano
salis.

REVIEWS

The late Deryck Cooke was another solid Wagnerianunwilling to reject a lot of Romantic hocus-pocus. One of the first traps Wagner set for posterity was his description of his musical education. Cooke falls right into it when he writes in the Companion that Wagner"was few harmony lessons when he was sixteen; and finally, at eighteen, he studied composition for six months with Theodor Weinlig, the Cantor of St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig" (p. 248). Several friends and acquaintances of Wagner's later years were witness to his astonishing assertion that he was "musically uneducated," including an adoring young Hugo Wolf who visited Wagner in Vienna in 1875.4 Nietzsche,
too, based his unpolemical observations about Wagner's "dilettante" upbringing (later developed more polemically by Mann and Adorno) in fact almost entirely self-taught ... he had a

4See Frank Walker, "Hugo Wolf's Vienna Diary, 1875-76," Music & Letters 28 (1947), 18. Also Dannreuther's valuable article on Wagner in the first edition of Grove's (London, 1889), IV, 369.

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Rote Brieftasche,

on Wagner's own account in Mein Leben, the first proofs of which it was Nietzsche's privilege to correct. But Wagner's diary, the

mony lessons" he had with the Leipzig conductor Christian Gottlieb Miiller lasted at least three years.5 His contrapuntal exercises for Theodor Weinlig (in the Bayreuth archives), and above all the early letters to his family, show that he worked hard and conscientiously, always seeking to please his superiors and not at all averse to arid conformity as Cooke suggests. Wagner skillfully obscured his birth pangs as a composer in Mein Leben by turning himself into a renegade prodigy "almost without actual learning" (fast ohne eigentliches

proves that the "few har-

Ring which we all know as "Redemption through Love." I counted four different interpretations of this motive in the present books under review, none of them with the simplicity and logic of Wagner'sown. In 1875 he authorized Cosima to write to an intelligent inquirer that "the motive sung to Briinnhilde by Sieglinde [in Die Walkdire]is the glorification of Briinnhilde which at the end of the to speak, by the entirety."6 Not only is this a specific concept, it also touches on one of Wagner'sperennial concerns and an important aspect of the Ring which is often overlooked: the relation of the individual to the community. The isolated appearance of the motive sung by an individual in Die Walkare and its frequent repetition in the presence of a silent could be seen as a striking symbol of this idea. Westernhagen's hypothesis about the socalled "Redemption through Love" motive in his biographyis exceedingly fragile. Noting the conspicuous absence of the motive in the composition sketch of Die Walkaire, he suggests that Wagnermust have conceived it originally "for its transfiguringrole in Gotterdiimmerung ible until the reader remembers one simple fact: Die Walkire was given its first performance in Munich on 26 June 1870 (complete with "Redemption through Love" motive) almost two years before Wagnerbegan sketching Westernhagen also misses the important point that the sketch of the full score of Die Walkure already contains the motive. In all probability, then, Wagner first introduced the motive between the completion of the composition
6Unpublished letter from Cosima Wagner to the chemist Edmund von Lippmann: "Geehrter Herr, / AuBer Stande Ihnen pers6nlich I/zuantivarten, trigt mir Sie mein Mann / auf, Ihnen zu sagen, daB das Motiv, / welches Sieglinde der BrUinnhilde zu-/singt, die Verherrlichung Briinnhilden's / ist, welche am Schluss des Werkes / gleichsam von der Gesammtheit / aufgenommen wird. / Den Empfehlungen meines Mannes / fUige ich den Ausdruck meiner / Hochachtung bei / Frau Richard Wagner / 6 September 1875." See Catalogue 100, Proszenium. Theater- und Film-Fachantiquariat, Kemnath Stadt (Germany, n.d.).

work [Die Gdtterddmmerung] is taken up, so

Lernen)-a very adult idea not unrelated to the Romantic concept of "natural," uneducated genius projected onto Siegfriedin the Ring, but hardly borne out by Wagner's youthful correspondence and the long list of highly imitative works he wrote as a surprisingly uninspired beginner. Cooke is a little ingenuous, too, on the subject of leading-motives. It is true of course that most of the nonsense written about leitmotiv originates with Wagner's disciple Hans von Wolzogen. But it is not true that Wagner refrained from attaching labels to his musical ideas, as Cooke states. Nor is it true that Wagner "never intended his music to convey the conceptual ideas of the drama"(p. 227). By clinging to the first legend Cooke creates another: Wagner not only labeled his motives on rare occasions, he also gave them a conceptual and emotional significance at variance with the labels provided by his interpreters. A good example is the transition to the second scene of Das Rheingold where the motive which Wolzogen called the "Ring" is characterized in Wagner's composition sketch as "World Inheritance" (Welterbe). But perhaps the most interesting case is the motive in the
letter to Muiller not included in Sdmtliche Briefe and published for the first time by the present writer proves that Wagner took these lessons far more seriously than he ever admitted publicly. See John Deathridge, "Wagner und sein erster Lehrmeister. Mit einem unver6ffentlichten Brief Richard Wagners," Meistersinger Programmheft der Bayerischen Staatsoper (Munich, 1979), pp. 71-75.
5A

on-stage

chorus in Die

G6tterddmmerung

... and only subsequently decided to anticipate it in Die Walkire" (p. 202). This sounds plaus-

the end of Die Gotterdammerung

in 1872.

84

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sketch in 1854 and work on the full score in 1855-56. Wagner could have conceived the

motive for its role in Die G6tterddmmerung at

this early stage, of course; but there is no evidence for this, and it is certainly not a fact we can deduce, as Westernhagen does, merely from the absence of the motive in the composition sketch of Die Walkuire.

Natalie did not want posterity to know that Wagnerwent to jail. Therefore Wagnerwent to jail.
Credo ... et invisibilium.

REVIEWS

Westernhagenseems preoccupied with invisible evidence. On the delicate subject of Minna Wagner's alleged adultery, for example, he catches one of Ernest Newman's typical red herrings. The absence of Wagner's forgiving letter to Minna of September 1837 from the former Burrell Collection, Newman claimed, "is the completest proof imaginable of the veracity of Wagner'saccount of the episode of her flight and infidelity."' Not content with repeating this, Westernhagen makes similar claims about another document. The missing first page of a draft of a letter to Theodor Apel dated 25 October 1840, Westernhagen tells us, is convincing evidence that Wagnermust have been in the Paris debtors' prison at this time. The absence of the very page on which Wagner mentions his stay in prison "demonstrates once again that the destruction of a document can conclusively prove its content" (p. 61). Sadly but simply, Westernhagen believes only one of a hundred possible reasons for the documents being missing: their destruction by Minna or her daughter Natalie. Also assuming the motivation of these much-maligned women, he then arrives at an established fact by the questionable process of combining two hypothetical arguments. Minna or Natalie destroyed Wagner's letter of September 1837 because it contained an incriminating account of Minna's unfaithfulness. Therefore Minna was unfaithful. The first page of Wagner's drafted letter to Apel was destroyed because Minna or
1The Life of Richard Wagner (New York, 1933), I, 234. Newman miscalculates the date of the letter as October 1837 (cf. Sdmtliche Briefe I, 336) and Westernhagen's translator adds further confusion by assuming that it is a letter from Minna to Wagner instead of the other way around. The passage on p. 47 of Westernhagen's biography should read: "The absence from the Burrell Collection of the first letter asking her to forgive him is the conclusive proof of her guilt."

that Minna or Natalie suppressed the evidence? How can we know that Wagner'sletter incriminates Minna if the document does not even exist? And what about the five good reasons, closely argued by the editors of the Collected Correspondence,8why Wagnerprobably never went to jail in the first place? More serious still is Westernhagen's handling of evidence which really does exist. Proof of Wagner'senthusiasm for Bakunin's destructivism during the Dresden Revolution of 1849, for example, is simply ignored. Instead, Westernhagen mixes present and future by projecting Wagner's later, more skeptical view of Bakunin in Mein Leben onto his revolutionary ideology of twenty years earlier. Thus the reader is misled into thinking that Wagner's opinion of Bakunin in his autobiography was also his opinion during the Revolution, even though the documents prove otherwise (see the first set of comparative citations, on p. 86). Indirect quotation, too, enables Westernhagen to omit important information unobtrusively. One of Wagner'sletters to Ludwig II is quoted in such a way that the reader can never guess its real purpose. Wagner wrote to Ludwig not just to tell him about his daily routine in Triebschen, as Westernhagen would have us believe, but deliberately to deceive the king about Hans von Btilow's wife Cosima, who, contrary to the impression given by the letter, was actually living with Wagner at the time (citations, 2). Indeed, the barbs in Wagner's character are the cause of some particularly blatant censorship. One of his worst pieces of belligerent chauvinism-a letter to Catulle and Judith Mendes on the German victory in the Franco-PrussianWar of 1870-is suitably trimmed to make it seem like a charitable outpouring of high-minded pathos (citations, 3).
And Bismarck's alleged opinion about his meeting with Wagner in 1871 is diplomatically garbled. The author of Westernhagen's source,
8Sdmtliche Briefe I, 414-16.

Where is the proof

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COMPARATIVE CITATIONS 1. Wagnercould not help but see that Bakunin's insistence on the need to destroy all cultural institutions rested on premises of vertiginous imshould be translated "premises completely without foundation"] (Westernhagen,1978, p. 133).
Voraussetzungen "The Revolution," 1849; Siimtliche und Dichtungen XII, 250).

I want to destroy the orderof things ... (Wagner,

Schriften

plications [sic! bodenlosesten

ambition is: destruction (Wagner to Minna, 18

May 1849; Siamtliche Briefe II, 653).

completely regardless of everything . .. his only

A really victorious revolutionary must act

ings were devoted to reading ... (Westernhagen,

2. [He] went back to the score again. The even1978, p. 413).

... (Wagner to Ludwig II, 24 February 1869; Briefwechsel II, 262).

I go back to my score again (if there are no letters to write!!); after working until about 8 o'clock, I returnfor tea and a very light supperon the upper floor which I have finally decided to allocate for the visits of the Friend [i.e., Cosima] during the summer. I finish the evening with some reading

3. [Catulle's letter] stirredWagnerto sit down the same day and write both the Mendes a "vigorous" letter, running to four pages of print: "My dears,I do not need to tell you how sad your letter made me. It is truly a tragedythat is taking place between us" (Westernhagen,1978, p. 431).

[Richard] writes vigorously to Catulle, always reiterating: you got what you deserved (Cosima Wagner'sDiaries [12 September 1870], I, 269). My dears,I do not need to tell you how sad your letter makes me. It is truly a tragedythat is taking place between us. I have nothing, absolutely nothing to offer you which could resemble a consolation (Wagnerto Catulle and Judith Mendes, Tiersot, p. 322).
12 September 1870; Lettres frangaises de RW, ed.

4. He had never encountered such self-confidence, Bismarck told Bucher after the meeting (Westernhagen,1978, p. 435).

Bismarck said that he was certainly not without self-confidence himself; but Wagner's selfconfidence just about beat everything he had ever encountered in a German before (Glasenapp, Biography [4th edn.] IV, 355).

Wagner's first biographer Carl Glasenapp, gleaned Bismarck's clearly skeptical remarks from a Vienna newspaper and rightly doubted their authenticity. Westernhagen therefore achieves a double somersault: not only is his source unreliable, he also adds further confusion by transforming it from a negative into a positive statement (citations, 4). The most painful flaw in Westernhagen's biography, and in his contribution to The Wagner Companion, "Wagner as a Writer," is his presentation of Wagner's anti-Semitism. The subject of Wagner and the Jews, of course, is a card that is always overplayed by the 86

anti-Wagnerites. However, it is one thing to defend Wagner against pointless moral outrage, as anyone who sees the historical distance between Wagner and Nazism is bound to do, and quite another to distort his beliefs. Westernhagen never misses an opportunity to stress Wagner's kindness and humanity towards the Jews. But the constant implication that he was therefore less than serious about his antiSemitism is simply wrong. A letter of 22 November 1881 to Ludwig II, from which Westernhagen quotes only the most trivial to the word "recovery"-is portion-up just one of many documents proving that Wagner's

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REVIEWS

5. A year before, indeed, Wagner had refused to sign the mass petition "against the growing influence of the Jews" which BernhardF6rster, later the husband of Elisabeth Nietzsche, organized for presentation to Bismarck (Westernhagen, 1978, p. 568).
Essai sur l'in?galite des races humaines, read him

He [RW] does not sign it [the petition] ... he says

that (1) he has already done what he can; (2) he dislikes appealing to Bismarck, whom he now sees as irresponsible, just following his own caprices; (3) nothing more can be done in the matter (CW'sDiaries [16 June 1880], II, 489. In the evening R. reads to the Count those pages of the latter's book (vol. IV, chap. 3) which he so loves, and afterwardsplays the Prelude to ParsiThe Master read the Friend [Gobineau] those pages from the chapter on the Germanic races which he loved so much and finished by playing the Prelude to Parsifal. With this gesture he wanted to say that he had not forgotten how to hope (Westernhagen, "Gobineau," Bayreuther
Festspielfthrer [1937], p. 166. After reading the poem of Die Meistersinger,

6. Wagner,who had just got to know Gobineau's

a section from his chapter on the German races and then played the Prelude to Parsifal. It was a symbolic act, an attempt to express his desire to override the severity of Gobineau's ideas on race by the spirit of Christianity (Westernhagen,1978,
p. 569).

fal ... (CW's Diaries [12 May 1881], II, 666).

sorrows of the protagonists [sic] to something higher than purely personal concerns, the fate and the mission of art, Wagnerfound an incomparable means of avoiding the dangers of a customary happy ending (Westernhagen, 1978, p. 384).

moments of Die Meistersinger, from the joys and

7. By changing the focus of attention, in the last

Frantz wrote to Wagner telling him that he should introduce the idea of the Reich into the work- 'The Reich should be seen in the background," he said. When Wagner came to compose Sachs's concluding address half a year later, he introduced the lines "Habt acht! Uns
drohen tible Streiche ...". In these nine lines he

gave to this play about middle-class life a larger dimension: the great background of the Reich (Westernhagen, "Wagner und das Reich," Neue ed. Strobel [1943], p. 50). Wagner-Forschung,

8. Wagner regarded the essay ["Judaism in Music"] as one of his occasional pieces stimulated by day-to-day events and having no more than the immediate relevance of journalism
(Westernhagen, Wagner Companion, p. 346).

"Judaismin Music"-the essay in which Wagner scented out the problem of race in orderto pursue it and remain hard on its heels until the end of his
life (Westernhagen, RWs Kampf gegen seelische Fremdherrschaft [1935], p. 25).

much-vaunted largesse on the Jewish question was morally ambiguous, to say the least: Oh! My king! Where are we living? We've settled ourselves so comfortably-between two gardens of palm trees!-that I look forward with complete praise as far as humanity towards the Jews is conare full of friendly sympathy and understanding.But this is only possible because I take the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it ... perhaps I am the last German who knows how to maintain his honour as an artist in the face of the Judaismwhich is already dominating
everything. (Briefwechsel III, 228-30). cerned .... My relations with some of these people confidence to recovery ... I can safely claim some

And if Westernhagen thinks that Wagner's refusal to sign F6rster's petition to Bismarck was another pro-Jewish gesture, he should look up Wagner's real, and not exactly noble, reasons for withholding his signature in Cosima Wagner's diaries (citations, 5). Westernhagen's book teems with similar examples. On the subject of Wagner and Gobineau, for instance, he is particularly misleading. Although Gobineau was not anti-Semitic, as is often assumed, his pessimistic view of the supremacy and decline of the Germanic races greatly appealed to Wagner. Yet Westernhagen interprets an important passage from Cosima's diaries as if the 87

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opposite were true (citations, 6). This is all the more surprising since he quotes the same source more accurately in one of his earlier essays. Indeed, many of his early writings, none of which he has publicly disowned, are closer to the truth about Wagner'scultural and political philosophy than his later ones. One informative essay, "Wagner and the Reich," for example, puts forwardthe interesting idea (not to be found in the biography) that it was the politician and publicist Constantin Frantzwho suggested the famous revision of Sachs's address at the end of Die Meistersinger (citations, 7). And in 1935 Westernhagenwas not afraidto say, quite correctly, that the Jewish question became one of Wagner'scentral preoccupations from middle age to the end of his life-a striking contrast to his totally untrue assertion in
The

questionable methods and seductive reasoning. Instead of the in-depth appraisal of Wagner's life and work that is still badly needed, Westernhagenhas written yet another hagiography. Finally a word about translation. It is disconcerting to see in Anne Sessa's and John DiGaetani's books a revival of Ashton Ellis's elephantine English equivalent of Wagner's prose. Titles like "What Boots this Knowledge?" "Herodom and Christianity" and large chunks of Wagner's essays renderedinto EllisEnglish hardly encouragea clear understanding of Wagner's ideas. "No Englishman who does not understand German can understand this Ellis-style," Chamberlain once observed to Cosima Wagner."Ellis is faithful enough to the word-too faithful; but not to the sense." Sessa and DiGaetani should take Chamberlain's words to heart. For this reader,Mary Whittall's stylish translation of Westernhagen's biography reads better than the original. Nevertheless, there are numerous inaccuracies which add confusion to what is already a confused book. There are some minor stylistic points-unnecessary colloquialisms (e.g., "a bloke without a hope," p. 581), occasional solecisms (e.g. "protagonists," pp. 66, 384), plural for singular and vice versa (e.g., Aufkldrungen is best renderedin English as "Elucidation"rather than the clumsy "Clarifications," p. 407; die Kapellmeister is not "musical director," (p. 155), in nineteenthcentury German opera houses a person of low rank in the singular, but "[opera] house conductors," persons of higher rank in the plural). And Whittall's handling of indirect speech is not always happy. Westernhagen's irritatingly frequent use of the conjunctive in German often leads to confusion in English. Referring to the English critics Chorley and Davison, for example, Whittall has: "They were of course rogues and fools" (p. 206), which sounds
grotesquely partisan even for Westernhagen. But the original is in the conjunctive which means that Wagner's London friends are being quoted indirectly. The passage should read: "they were of course rogues and fools, Wagner was told . . ." More serious are the mistakes which change the meaning of Westernhagen's

"Judaism in Music" (1850), to which Wagner appended a serious and even longer "Elucidation" on its republication in 1869, was merely an "occasional" piece of journalism (citations, 8). Wagner's anti-Semitism and his political philosophy are just as much a part of the nineteenth century as his art. To repress or distort them is to disfigure the age in which he lived, not to mention the complex personality of the man himself. Westernhagen's superlatives do Wagner a disservice by dehumanizing him. There is nothing of Wagner'swily egoism, sardonic humor and obsessive character; and even the excitement of his music is smothered with devout prose. In a sense, Westernhagen has not written a biography at all, but a Lobgesang to Wagner's art. This is a "positive biography,"his publishers tell us in a revealing non sequitur, because "his starting point is the importance and the supreme greatness of Wagner's artistry." The book has all the trappings of a substantial work of scholarship: lavish production in two volumes, an extensive bibliography, plentiful footnotes and a useful
index. But what Westernhagen has really done is to bend the truth of Wagner's life into the equivalent of an artistic experience. This is therefore a "positive biography" which, although it claims "to leave judgement to the reader" (p. xv), actually patronizes him with a ready-made viewpoint artfully concealed by
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Wagner

Companion

that

the

essay

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text. Apart from two already mentioned (fn. 7 and citation 1), Wagner's revealing words "a real melody that was all my own ... was all I aimed at when I started to compose; I never went in for sophisticated ponderings like Schumann" (pp. 33-34) should read: "I immediately started composing for effect; I never went in for introverted ponderings and sophisSchumann." And Whittall has mistranslated one of Wagner's most famous sayings. In a moment of doubt about the fate of Parsifal, Wagner did not say that he wanted to create "invisible acting" (p. 544). He used the word Theater, which in German can mean either the theater as a whole or the stage in particular.
ticated subtleties (Grfibelei, Spintisierei) like

been misunderstood by generations of Wagnerians, including Wieland Wagner (who used it to justify his scenic concept of Entrfimpelung or "clearingaway of old lumber")and Westernhagen. Instead of the completely serious remark it is often taken to be, it is actually a perfect example of the sardonic humour seldom appreciated by Wagner's admirers. Here is the end of the quotation in full with the passage omitted by Westernhagen in italics: "Having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible theater! And the inauWagner's-. Diaries [23 September 1878], II, 154). dible orchestra" (Cosima

the Bayreuther Bldtter (1937) this saying has

Incidentally, since its incomplete citation in

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